Media reports said the district Collector approved the proposal for clinical trial of some Ayurvedic medicines of the Patanjali group on COVID-19 patients but later quashed it. Patanjali Ayurved's MD Acharya Balkrishna told that there is a need to understand the company does not want to undertake any new experiment or trial of Ayurvedic treatment regime on COVID-19 patients in Indore.

The World Health Organization said it has halted studies of hydroxychloroquine in its Solidarity Trial after The Lancet published a piece that said a higher mortality rate was estimated for critically ill patients who received the drug, when used alone or with a macrolide.

China is expending great efforts in the global scramble to develop a vaccine for the new coronaries epidemic that began in its central city of Wuhan, with Chinese researchers conducting five separate clinical trials on humans, or half of all such trials globally, according to the data compiled by the World Health Organization.

While all new drugs must undergo trials before getting marketing approval in India, the regulator can grant exemptions in public interest and in cases of national emergency, extreme urgency and epidemics.

Oxford’s effort involves its multidisciplinary Vaccine Group, set up in 1994 to study new and improved inoculations, and the Jenner Institute, which works on both human and livestock diseases. It is based on a chimpanzee adenovirus — a common cold virus —which has been genetically changed to stop Covid-19 replicating in humans.

The scientists said these drugs should not be used to treat COVID-19 patients outside of clinical trials until results from randomised clinical trials are available to confirm their safety and efficacy for COVID-19 patients. They explained chloroquine, an antimalarial drug and its analogue, hydroxychloroquine, are commonly used to treat autoimmune diseases.

WHO last week stopped one arm of the Covid-19 Solidarity trial of HCQ, only to resume it again this week. Its decision to stop the trial was based on a Lancet study by professor Mandeep Mehra of Harvard and the Brigham and Women’s hospital, who used data from 96,000 patients to conclude that the drug caused higher mortality in its trial patients.